Film & Video (Film & Video)

The absurd condition of human survival under environmental degradation and geonational balkanization is taken as a starting point for WA’AD by YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES. The work’s premise is a confessional narrative emerging from a Palestinian astronaut on a desperate international flight mission to colonize Mars. That there is also an Israeli astronaut on the same mission plays into the complexities of the landed history of ethnic antagonism between Israel and Palestine, which has stretched on for centuries.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

To the syncopations of a jazzy soundtrack, Korean words in white against a black background flashes between an English dialogue in black text against white ground. Comprised of curt lines such as “forever” “failure” “to live,” the Korean forms non-sequiturs and double entendres to the English script following a line of questioning between a detective and a victim telling a meandering story surrounding a bullet being in a wrist, going to hospital, traveling to Japan, and the discovery of a love triangle. This narrative of a potentially grave situation is told in a nonchalant manner.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Pacific Limn weaves together three narratives that comment on hyper-capitalism pan-Pacific cities that San Francisco exemplifies. Each of the large works comprise of moving images overlaid with giant text, all synched to a stealthy, up-tempo jazz soundtrack. In The Secret Life of Harumi, a Japanese woman fantasizes escaping her job and living a temporary dream life in San Francisco.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video “Shangri-La” refers to the mythical city of James Hilton’s novel “Lost Horizon” written in 1933 and is exemplified in a film by Frank Capra which speaks of eternal youth in a city of happiness. In 1997, a small town in an agricultural region of central China near the Tibetan border was proclaimed as the place that inspired Shangri-la. Thereafter, a dozen other cities in the same area have claimed to be paradise on earth, prompting a marketing battle without mercy, raging on until the government’s intervention.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Muted Situations #2: Muted Lion Dance by Samson Young, Chinese lion dancers perform the auspicious procession traditionally presented at special occasions such as weddings or during the Lunar New Year. Yet, the customary percussive sound of drums and cymbals are absent. Instead, it is the sound of the performers’ physical exertion that comes to the forefront, revealing the beautiful, exhaustive rhythm of their craft—their feet hitting the ground, deep inhales and exhales, and the rustling of their clothes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“Product Recall” is a video perfomative pun on the action recalling memories in the form of a psychoanalytic session and the recall of faulty products from multinational corporations. Young enters a practicing psychoanalyst room and begins a session. Dressed in corporate business attire, Young encompasses both the corporation and individual.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Report of the Legal Subcommittee is a print featuring a map of the stars, together with a found transcription of a recent United Nations meeting in which various international delegations declare frustration with their 40-year-old, ongoing efforts to devise a legal definition of outer space. This admission seems to hold a rich poetic potential, the human attempts to bureaucratize and control outer space seemingly frustrated by the sublime scale and mystery of its infinite depths.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The artist describes the work as “very performative video-pieces but they take on a more sculptural feel. The action is simple: I kick a video camera through a site that is embedded with sociological elements, which I try to question through my practice. I chose Red Square as the site to work in Moscow.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk . The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk . The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Taking the same name as their most recent solo show at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf, siren eun young jung’s video work Deferral Theatre intertwines various threads from the last decade of the artist’s research into the Yeoseong Gukgeuk theatrical form, in which all of the roles are played by women, as well as performance-based modes of queer resistance in South Korea. The radical and temporally border-crossing qualities of gender fluidity, and lineages of queer subversion within performative spaces, animate Deferral Theatre through a critical deconstruction of Korean history, tradition and gender norms. One particularly powerful scene depicts a young drag king performer tearing at their suit and tie as they lip-sync passionately to a song in English, while the frame lilts with an ecstatic languor, as if the operator of the camera were staggering feverishly.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lyrics 1, 2, 3 is part of siren eun young jung Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008–). The work closely follows first and second generations of Yeoseong Gukgeuk actresses, who later became an important source of inspiration for the artist. Formally, this genre of theater draws from Westernized aspects of traditional Korean music performance, as well as from adaptations of pansori , a Korean genre of musical storytelling, to create a staged version of traditional Korean opera.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk . The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk . The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women.

Painting (Painting)

Young Min Moon’s recent paintings repetitively portray the rituals bound up in the Korean tradition of Jesa. Even amidst the disappearance of many Korean customs, Jesa, a type of Confucian ancestor veneration rites, remains a practice in South Korean society that cannot be easily discarded. Throughout the artist’s childhood, Jesa were the only moments through which he could find peace and safety in times that were rife with violence and commotion.

Painting (Painting)

Young Min Moon’s recent paintings repetitively portray the rituals bound up in the Korean tradition of Jesa . Even amidst the disappearance of many Korean customs, Jesa, a type of Confucian ancestor veneration rites, remains a practice in South Korean society that cannot be easily discarded. Throughout the artist’s childhood, Jesa were the only moments through which he could find peace and safety in times that were rife with violence and commotion.

Photography (Photography)

The lengthy titles in Chen Xiaoyun’s work often appear as colophons to his photographs that invite the viewer to a process of self realization through contemplating the distance between word and image. Near his studio, Chen often walks over fallen branches in late autumn and sense their existence. Thus, his placing them in diverse contexts builds a “narrative Ariadne’s thread” where the branches become “the language of things” intertextually cohering his oeuvre.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

He Xiangyu’s Terminal 3 presents excerpts from the lives of young African acrobats attending the Hebei Wuqiao Acrobatic Arts School in China. Acrobatics, which had a rich history as a court display in imperial China, is now integral to the cultural industries and tourism sector in Wuqiao, continuing a legacy of expending bodies for monetary gain. From 2016 to 2019, He intermittently went to Wuqiao Acrobatics School in Hebei Province to record the daily lives of the students who study a variety of acrobatic skills during their year-long program.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Class (2005) by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook challenges the viewer’s personal sense of morality and tolerance by depicting a classroom from hell. In the video, a woman, dressed in black with a white over shirt, stands in front of a long blackboard. The classroom’s rear walls and floor are covered in taut white fabric, given the room the sinister appearance of a sanitarium or a crime scene.

Photography (Photography)

In the work We only move wehen something changes !! !, Olaf Breuning composes a portrait of posed antiglobalization protesters, each wearing clown noses, inside of a scene reminiscent of an event. Like in the work Easter Bunnies (2004) (photographs of the Moai of Easter Island with big ears and rabbit teeth supported by scaffolding) the artist introduces the outside frame into his photographic frame.

Painting (Painting)

thanks for staying alive Fern.1994 by rafa esparza is from a body of work that pays homage to youth culture in the 90s. The work is based on the popularity of mid-90s era Star Shots photographs, which usually featured graphic backgrounds and highly glamorized subjects wearing heavy makeup, matching outfits, perfectly coiffed hair, and dramatic expressions. In Los Angeles, esparza remembers many Black and Brown youths going to the mall (where many Star Shots photo studios were located) to circulate the photos with personal messages written on the back.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Blindfold Receptor (caterpillar-yellow) by Leelee Chan is inspired by the camouflaging nature of the peppered-moth caterpillar. In 1800s Europe, during the industrial revolution, light-colored moths evolved into a darker color after trees in their habitat darkened by the polluting soot. Today, due to rapid human changes to the environment, caterpillars can adapt even before they metamorphose into moths, mimicking the colour of the branches they inhabit.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland by Karrabing Film Collective is a surreal exploration of Western toxic contamination, capitalism, and human and non-human life. Set in a land and seascape poisoned by capitalism where only Aboriginals can survive long periods outdoors, the film tells the story of a young Indigenous man, Aiden, taken away when he was just a baby to be a part of a medical experiment to save the white race. He is then released back into the world to his family.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Almost One by Jeamin Cha dives into an uncomfortable meditation on the relationship between socialization, performativity, truth, and childhood, filtered through the optics of a children’s acting class in South Korea. Such a context possesses a loaded set of connotations due to the meteoric rise of Korean entertainment industries. Acting or singing academies have increasingly attracted negative press for their intensity and cutthroat standards, a system for producing talent with little emotional concern for its offspring.

Photography (Photography)

“People often asked if they could pose with the Kodak advertisement where a full scale woman is featured with a camera offering Kodak rolls. They invented the poses, the gestures and situations.” Hashem El Madani. Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948.

NFT (NFT)

Monuments of the Disclosed by Ahmet Ögüt is an NFT series of digital monuments to whistleblowers. As part of the drop of Augmented Reality sculptures, Ögüt invites the public to participate in populating public space with AR monuments, honoring those who have stood up to corrupt power. Each monument is dedicated to a different individual who stood up to protest systems far larger than themselves.

Photography (Photography)

In the early 20th century, the Hercules Engine Company was doing a brisk business producing customized, heavy-duty engines. Seventy years later, when the United States military started opting for Humvees and stock parts, the company began to fail, and it entirely ceased production in 1999. Hercules Engines, Abandoned, Canton, Ohio (2011) depicts the manufacturer’s former productive core, gone fallow.

Painting (Painting)

Calling attention to campaigns for land rights, survival, and sovereignty, Prabhakar Pachpute’s recent works consider how farmers in India use their bodies in performative ways during acts of protest. The oil painting Inclined uncertainties depicts a grotto-like city atop a boat carried by headless human bodies. The waterless boat navigates through a desolate landscape, propelled forward by the faceless humans, who appear to be holding the cumbersome structure together.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Birdstones is a series of flat concrete slabs made from moldings of different shapes, each with two small holes. They stand vertically in space in a precarious stance. Heavy by the density of the concrete, they are also airy and floating.

Photography (Photography)

For his action, Safely Maneuvering across Lin He Road , Lin built a brick wall on one side of a busy main street in the city of Guangzhou. He then took bricks from the sidewalk end of the wall and moved them to the street side, slowly extending the wall into the street. Repeating the same gesture for hours, he leapfrogged the whole wall across the street.